It can be useful for a person to know how he or she compares to others in a variety of respects. For example, a user may be conscious of the need to conserve energy in the operation of his home. He may want to know whether his home energy usage is greater or less than that of other homeowners.
Continuing this example, if the user lives in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, e.g., in Pennsylvania, it may not be useful to compare his energy usage to that of a homeowner in a different location, such as North Carolina or Minnesota. During the winter months, for example, a homeowner in North Carolina may have limited energy consumption for heating purposes; meanwhile a homeowner in Minnesota would normally consume a significant amount of energy to heat his home during the winter, perhaps more so than the user in Pennsylvania. The user's energy needs, therefore, may not be comparable to the energy needs of homeowners living in other locales. Even within the state of Pennsylvania, climates may differ significantly. Some live in mountainous areas, others live in the Great Lakes region, and others live in the heat island of Philadelphia. It would therefore be of limited value for the user to compare his energy usage to someone living in a different geographic region, whether these different geographic regions are defined by location or climate.
Moreover, other homeowners may use their homes in a different manner than the user. Some homeowners may work at home, so that the house is occupied almost all of the time, requiring heating throughout the day during the winter. Other homeowners work during outside the home, perhaps leaving the house at 7:30 AM to go to work and returning at 6:00 PM. In the latter case, the homeowner's energy requirements would be limited during this time.
Therefore, it is not necessarily useful for a user to compare his energy usage to that of another random user. This could lead to invalid and misleading comparisons. It would be more useful for the user to compare his energy usage to others that are similarly situated, geographically and otherwise. Moreover, this may also be true for statistics aside from energy usage. A user may be interested in how he compares to others in other respects, such as internet usage, healthcare costs, or income level. For all such inquiries a user would generally need to compare himself to similarly situated peers in order to generate meaningful comparisons.